


Wait a Little Longer

by speckledsolanaceae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Cock Rings, Enthusiastic Consent, Established Relationship, M/M, Magical Realism, Monogamous Spitroasting, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, don't be fooled this has a long lead-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-19 10:00:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29624559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae
Summary: Sometimes edging is about two weeks of voluntary celibacy in order to wreck your partner's shit.
Relationships: Dong Si Cheng | WinWin/Liu Yang Yang
Comments: 9
Kudos: 132





	Wait a Little Longer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [freelancejouster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/freelancejouster/gifts).



> This was written for the DonationBin fic event (and will eventually be posted to a collection—the mod gave me their blessing to post)! The guidelines were that we donated a WIP we knew we would never finish, then were given a WIP from another writer in turn. We distilled our work into a single prompt for ease, and this was freelancejouster's prompt to me:
> 
> _"anime nerd's witchy boyfriend learns tentacle spell for anime nerd's birthday"_
> 
> We were given complete creative liberty to take our prompts in any direction we chose, but I want to thank Kiwi for the wonderful foundations for inspiration. They'll be able to see some nods to their own WIP, and hopefully they'll very much enjoy the result!

It had been eight hours. 

Sicheng began to be concerned around 1 A.M., if only because hunting after nightfall rarely went past midnight. Add on top of that the torrential rain that forecasted legitimate mudslides, and he was surprised the kalanchoe flower he’d drawn on the back of his hand at midnight hadn’t turned into a knife yet.

He trusted the healthy, manifested blossoms that remained pressed against his tendons, but couldn’t make himself leave the overburdened couch at the entrance.

Visitors said it smelled like stale chrysanthemum, and he had to agree now that he hadn’t moved for five hours straight and had a crick in his hip and had read the same first chapter of _Analog: Harnessing Variability_ approximately six times and was generally so zoned out trying to listen to the thunderous rain outside that he might as well be astral projecting.

Despite his distracted listening skills and the way he was so exhausted but belligerently alert, he still startled badly enough when the portal doorknob rattled that he dropped his book and mumbled a small swear.

The door banged open like a spell backfiring, and Yangyang entered with rain and mud at his heels. His crossbow hung from one hand, massive and black, before vanishing in a small warp without reducing a single centimeter of Yangyang’s vaguely homicidal energy.

He was plastered. Absolutely inhuman and dripping water onto the wooden floors. He left mud on the inner knob when he flung the door closed as well as a smudge above it.

His eyes and teeth were the only unsullied part of him, both flashing some white when he cast his scarf off the bottom half of his face, its sodden wool hitting the floor with a splat, and said with his chapped mouth, “You’re _hiding_ something from me.”

And, well, if that was what had kept Yangyang out at night for eight hours and thirteen minutes, he probably didn’t mean when Sicheng stole Yangyang’s last egg tart and blamed it on the German gnomes.

“Well, yes,” Sicheng said. “That’s common.”

Yangyang’s mouth popped open in the first throes of temporary paralysis, then curled into a gritty frown. His hair was making pathways of watery streaks down through the soil across his face. He looked like he needed to be sprayed by a hose.

Sicheng was not looking forward to breathing through his nose. So far he’d been judicious and using only his mouth.

“Well, like,” Yangyang said, sounding a little put-out, “a big thing, then.”

“Yangyang,” Sicheng replied calmly, finally exerting his hands to correct the book on his lap, “you tried to hide an entire dog from me two months ago.”

“And _failed,”_ Yangyang pointed out, voice settling deeper into a pout as he dripped and dripped and finally began to shiver.

“And failed,” Sicheng amended, setting _Analog_ on the cluttered table. The kalanchoe were fading off the back of his hand now that Yangyang was back. The tattooed timepiece on his inner wrist said it was four in the morning, its second hand sluggishly ticking for sleepiness. He’d have to calibrate it later. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he continued calmly, partially to convince himself. He was a terrible liar as soon as his heart got going. “I replenished your deodorant without your permission because last time it ran out you smelled for a week?”

“I always smell,” Yangyang said belligerently. “It comes with the trade.”

“True.”

The rain pounded. The house creaked.

Yangyang opened his mouth again. Closed it. He raised one hand to wipe at his nose, then scrubbed at his entire face, mussing an eyebrow and streaking the mud in horizontal strokes like a finger painting. He dropped his hands and looked small.

Sicheng’s heart twinged.

“You won’t have sex with me,” Yangyang said finally. “It’s been two weeks.”

The twinge turned to a sinkhole, and Sicheng hadn’t realized he’d been fidgeting until he ripped a hangnail out with his fingers. He hissed and looked down, eyes watering, then pressed the edge of his index between his lips, sucking on the damage. “It’s part of a spell,” Sicheng said after a beat had passed and Yangyang’s shivers turned to sad, juddering tremors. Sicheng tried to be gentler. “I didn’t want you to think—I thought you wouldn’t notice.”

Yangyang’s eyes stared out from beneath the smeared muck with a morose quality, posture gradually a bit slumped, and then he set his lips, gave a short little exhale through his nose like a dog turning up its snout, and trudged further into the house.

He shook his hair the moment he was within range of the couch, splattering everything in arcs, and Sicheng scrambled away with the clumsiness of a fatigue-hijacked body. He rammed his knee into the table and watched two rolls of crimson twine toss themselves off the lacquered wood as silty rainwater hit his cheek and upper arm.

“I’m going to shower,” Yangyang said imperiously, moving on without pause and leaving carnage in his wake like Jackson Pollock’s failed apprentice.

“No—” Sicheng started to hiss. “Wait. I haven’t gone to the bathroom in eight hours.”

“Sucks to _suck,_ you prude,” Yangyang called from the hallway as Sicheng lunged to his feet and coped with the headrush.

“I stayed up for you!” Sicheng yelled, steadying himself on the armrest before he teetered into the shelf of oracle bones. The door slammed then locked with a succinct click. “Fuck.”

Nearly slipping in the mud Yangyang had trekked into the house, Sicheng wiped the muck off his cheek and finally caught a whiff of compost, sod, and rain mixing with human skin and grudges left behind. 

He really did have to piss. It just hadn’t crossed his mind while wrestling with the possibility of his boyfriend of nearly four years getting sucked into a mer-bog and eventually losing his legs from the numbing suction.

Sicheng eyed the footprints on the wood, the red scarf looking much like a mound of mud with a twig growing out of it, then eventually the other clothes Yangyang had shed in the hallway.

The shower rattled alive, and Sicheng considered the lock.

He wasn’t being unnecessary with his abstinence. Animatus spells were fickle and sensitive, and if he loved Yangyang any less, it wouldn’t be a problem. Instead, he cared, and increased waves of spirituality and connection did mad things to developing spells. At the very least, he didn’t want Yangyang to see the mess that was on his back just yet.

So he’d been keeping his distance, and now he was unable to use the toilet.

Instead of getting a mop, he slid down the wall across from the bathroom door and reapplied his injured finger to his mouth.

If he were a handier witch, he would have known how to pick locks, but the most he knew how to do was alchemize a concoction that _might_ let him phase through the wood, and that would take five hours to brew at minimum.

Sleep continued to elude him for the entire thirty minutes Yangyang spent being a humanoid sponge, the witch kept awake by bladder pressure alone and the knowledge that maybe keeping this particular spell a secret was not the best way to go about an anniversary gift.

Four really was a bastard of a number.

There was a loud, disruptive clang as Yangyang shut the water off, and then it was just Sicheng trying to pick out the sound of a towel getting jerked around under the enduring sound of a rainstorm. He would have turned the portal knob to somewhere sunnier, but rain sounds usually helped him sleep.

For the moment, it was torturous.

With another impolite bang, the bathroom door burst open and Yangyang appeared with just his lower half covered, bleached flaxen hair tufting every which way from an aggressive rendezvous with the same towel that meagerly hid his hard-on.

“Why didn’t you take care of that in the shower?” Sicheng asked after a pause and earned the most miffed expression he’d received in a while from Yangyang’s sharp features.

He should have expected it. The damp towel came off and hit him in the face, and he only had a moment to pull it down and watch Yangyang retreat into the bedroom, completely in the nude with his crossbow back tattoo like a glaring threat.

“Just go to the bathroom,” Yangyang said stiffly, then he slammed that door too.

Right on impact, the nondescript dragon etching in the middle of the wooden panels morphed into _Yázi,_ the most aggressive dragon’s son baring his wolfish teeth at Sicheng. He grimaced at the icon, not appreciating the deeper proof of Yangyang’s mood, and winced to his feet to relieve himself. He was not looking forward to whatever argument awaited him in the bedroom. 

* * *

“If you wanted to break up with me, you should have just _said_ it,” was a particularly bad start.

Sicheng, a little light-headed, tried not to appraise the way Yangyang was sitting on the bed. Furious, he was on his knees against the mattress with his hair slightly more tamed and a flush grappling with his neck and cheeks. His eyes were burning just shy of pink. It was the spitting image of Yangyang being a brat before sex, at the perfect height to put his mouth around Sicheng’s cock.

Except this was not the same, and this was serious, and Yangyang had woefully gotten the wrong impression.

“That’s not happening,” Sicheng said after his throat stopped closing.

_“Communicating_ with me?” Yangyang snarled.

“Breaking _up_ with you,” Sicheng said. “I’m serious—it’s just an animatus spell. I have to be care—”

“You chose to work on an animatus spell,” Yangyang began, leaning up off his heels, “three weeks before our anniversary?”

Thunder cracked outside the window, lighting Sicheng’s nerves on fire. He crossed to the sill, veins going haywire, and yanked on the drawstring. When he pulled it back open, it was dawn in Indonesia.

He let out a breath, gathering his senses, and turned back to Yangyang, who now had his face turned away. That wasn’t a good sign.

“It’s a gift for you,” Sicheng said finally. “For our anniversary.”

He watched as Yangyang raised a hand to wipe at his nose. He traced his eyes over how the firm limbs of Yangyang’s crossbow drifted down his triceps in black ink.

Yangyang gave him the corner of his eye, just a slip of attention and a lowered guard. “Knowing that would have helped,” he croaked.

“I knew you would ask about it,” Sicheng said, easing into a sort of placid stubbornness now that Yangyang was giving him leeway. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“Well,” said Yangyang, “I’m surprised.” The conversation didn’t turn the way Sicheng expected it to. Instead, Yangyang showed his back more completely, crossbow stock slipping beneath the waistband of his boxers, and lowered himself down to the mattress, tucking himself in.

Conversation over.

Sicheng exhaled an unsteady breath.

The idea had happened upon him after the fifth or sixth time of Yangyang mentioning a passing interest over the course of the nearly four years of their relationship.

Tentacles. 

They’d never crossed his mind before Yangyang, but Sicheng wasn’t equipped to provide anything of the sort even if he could provide a number of other titillating experiences. Yangyang satisfied Sicheng’s kinks rather neatly, and Sicheng could cover a few in turn—somnophilia (made simpler with alchemical tinctures), bondage (easy), being a switch who could brat it up just as badly in Yangyang’s face, a few others.

But tentacles was a tricky one, because Sicheng didn’t fuck with summons to any degree. Evil spirits and dead things weren’t his wheelhouse, and they’d discussed before how Yangyang really wasn’t into possession or necrophilia—especially as a hunter. So even if Sicheng did fuck with summons, it wouldn’t do any good.

There were a few heavy-labor spells, though, that he’d spent a month or so investigating in a very deep rabbit hole. He’d had to borrow books from Kun, use Ten’s account for the web archive, and ultimately ask Dejun for help with the execution.

Despite his lack of foresight into how Yangyang would react to being cut out from sex cold-turkey, this plan had been in the works for nearly forty-seven days.

Again, if Sicheng loved Yangyang less, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

“Yangyang,” Sicheng attempted at Yangyang’s blanket-shrouded back. He could see the loop of the crossbow stirrup against the knuckles of Yangyang’s spine, just at the base of his neck.

Sicheng lowered himself down onto the mattress and got a waft of that cheap pomegranate shampoo smell, then ginger from their co-owned body wash. It was more comforting than appropriate for the situation.

Yangyang didn’t respond at all, so Sicheng tried again, inching his hand across the distance between them but falling short by scrunching the top blanket in his hand, awkward. “Does it help if I let you know it’s a sex thing? It’s for sex. It’ll pay off, I promise.”

The response he got in turn was Yangyang giving another doglike huff and shoving his face deeper into his pillow.

“C’mon, it’s not—”

Yangyang turned all at once and leveled Sicheng with a scathing glare from down below. “I’ve been sick over this for over a week. Fuck off.” With that, he turned back over and yanked on the blankets, covering himself all the way up to his ears.

Shaken all over again, Sicheng curled his fingers into his lap and reconciled himself to these consequences.

It wouldn’t be very sexy to be on the receiving end of Yangyang’s cold shoulder leading up to their anniversary. That wasn’t a good temperature in which to investigate a new kink.

At the same time, he couldn’t manhandle his way into Yangyang’s good graces, either. Not while he was still justifiably upset.

Sicheng lifted himself from the mattress and got ready for bed.

* * *

If Yangyang hunted his own grudges, he’d have a harder time at his trade.

Sicheng woke to an empty bed, fewer blankets than he’d gone to sleep with, and, once he’d gotten his wits and clothes sorted, a certain boyfriend scrolling through his phone on the entrance couch, bedhead, half the blankets, and all.

Everything looked the same as it had been last night, except now it was awash with an afternoon glow across all surfaces, from the crusty, dried surface of Yangyang’s mounded scarf to the trinket-crowded tabletops, busy shelves, and occupied counter spaces of the kitchen three hops away from Yangyang’s makeshift bed. The plants on the sills were glowing with daylight, and what could be seen of the polished wooden floors and surfaces were warm, but the atmosphere . . . was tepid at best.

“You really couldn’t bear to sleep with me?” Sicheng asked drily, halted in the entry to the hallway and looking at Yangyang’s criss-crossed legs all awkward and bisexual all over the narrow couch. Yangyang’s entire body seemed stubbornly content in his busy, cluttered way. He’d always fit right into Sicheng’s witchy disaster of an abode.

Sicheng walked over to the door to check the weather in East China.

The knob clicked from white over to red, and without opening the door, Sicheng could tell it was still storming out. The deluge came down on the roof all at once, angry and a more potent reminder of the night before.

Sicheng turned it back to Indonesia.

“I was wondering the same thing about you twelve hours ago,” Yangyang said snidely from the stale-chrysanthemum pillows. He flopped a leg up onto the back of the couch, hooking his ankle between the backing and cushions. “Gee, I wonder if I’ve done something wrong?”

Out of protective instincts alone, Sicheng arranged his expression into something cool. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” he said, “except not talk to me about your concerns and instead leaving for over eight hours during a storm.” He felt that coolness drop all too soon, replaced with a frustrated agitation that had him instantly reminded of his sore finger. He shoved his hands into his pockets and shot, “What are we? A wild crush between two teenagers?”

Yangyang sneered openly at him, and Sicheng bared his teeth.

They’d met, predictably for their behavior and relationship, in a swamp: Yangyang covered in duckweed and undead grime, Sicheng covered in duckweed and rashes from the waterlogged plant that was fighting him but needed for an elixir.

Ten called them bog monsters, and sometimes they were.

Yangyang locked his phone, lifted his hand, and flipped Sicheng the bird.

Sicheng lunged.

The moment was chaotic, Yangyang immediately screaming and flinging himself off the couch and away from Sicheng, subsequently knocking an entire table over and sending several bamboo slips slapping to the floor along with (thank heavens) three empty silver bottles. One of them cracked by the sound of it. 

Sicheng swung himself around the obstacles and dove for one of the kitchen chairs. Yangyang’s laugh at breaking something, the bastard, clashed with the sound of him drawing one of the pans off the drying rack in the kitchen and swinging it in Sicheng’s direction. 

Sicheng pulled back on his momentum halfway to smacking Yangyang in the head with a heavy mass of wood, and Yangyang’s cast iron skillet made a stupid, denting sound in the leg of the chair instead of splintering it halfway across the kitchen.

Backing off, Sicheng helfted the chair between them, giving them about a meter distance—too long for Yangyang to do any damage to Sicheng’s skull unless he threw the pan and just the right setup for Sicheng to pin Yangyang’s wiry body up against the cabinetry with the four legs in he needed to.

Yangyang heaved a heavy breath through his nose and readjusted his grip on the skillet. “Tell me what the spell is and I won’t chuck this at your head.”

“For fuck’s sake, Yangyang,” Sicheng said, heart beating a mile a minute. “Listen, you’ll like it. I’m not a total ass.”

The pan straightened out and leveled in the precise direction of Sicheng’s skull. “You owe me this.”

“I do _not,”_ Sicheng protested, voice cracking in indignance. “You should have told me you thought the world was ending you uncommunicative shithead!”

Yangyang bristled up again, eyes narrowing, then widening dangerously when Sicheng called him a “shithead.” “You’re the one,” said Yangyang, except he was yelling now, “who withdrew all affection for two weeks!”

“Well I can’t have sex with you,” Sicheng fumed. “What did you want me to do? _Cuddle?”_

“Oh _no,”_ Yangyang drawled, raising his free hand and doing a little jazz motion, voice dripping with deprecation. _“Cuddling.”_

Sicheng flushed and jabbed Yangyang in the stomach with the cross-beam. Yangyang gave a little _“oof!”_ “You’re only still for longer than twenty minutes when you’re unconscious,” Sicheng spat, “and you’re a fucking coat rack.”

One moment, Yangyang’s nose was crinkling up like an attack was forming and Sicheng was bracing himself for some kind of aggression, then the next, Yangyang barked out a laugh and draped himself over the chair, dispersing so much weight that Sicheng’s wrists gave out and the back legs hit the floor.

Still laughing, Yangyang yanked the chair from Sicheng’s grip, set it on the ground properly, and put his knee down on the seat before lifting himself level with Sicheng’s face. He grinned there then sighed a puff of morning breath into his face.

Sicheng wrinkled his nose and reached for the skillet, jerking it out of Yangyang’s grip.

“You like cuddling, though,” Yangyang said as Sicheng slammed the pan down onto the cool stovetop, and Sicheng’s neck warmed like he’d been slapped there. Physical affection was a bit of a warzone for him. It was something he reserved for partners, and he didn’t mind it in those contexts. Yangyang had him in a tight spot, knowing what they both knew. “Was it hard for you?”

“Shut up,” Sicheng mumbled and decided that he ought to put the pan away instead just so he could avoid looking at Yangyang for another ten seconds.

“Did you want to fuck me so bad that you couldn’t even cuddle, _bèndàn?”_

Sicheng’s entire face burned so badly he felt there had to be cinnabar roasting in his bloodstream, happily on its way to kill him.

He felt Yangyang’s fingers on his nape and leaned as far away from him as he could between two cupboard doors, stumbling a little, grip on the pan slipping. The pots clanged and Sicheng shot Yangyang, who was lowering himself into a crouch beside him, a warning glance.

“Show me, c’mon,” Yangyang wheedled, crowding into Sicheng’s space now that he could, and the hinges of the cupboard door against Sicheng’s side creaked dangerously at the weight. Sicheng cringed when Yangyang hooked his face in and took a whiff at his neck, probably trying to lift some of the spell’s scent off of him.

Freak.

“No,” Sicheng said firmly, pitching his voice deeper where he knew it could scare the local kids. He corrected the pans and tried to wiggle his way out of his predicament by pushing himself backwards and picking himself off the floor like a ruffled rooster. “Fuck off.”

Yangyang grinned at him, unperturbed and so obviously feeling better that Sicheng could afford to be annoyed. “Where is it?” Yangyang continued, watching Sicheng brush his ass off and glare.

“Nowhere. It’s a secret. I’m leaving,” Sicheng said all at once, straightened his shirt, and turned tail, rattled and annoyed.

* * *

“He threw a tantrum,” Sicheng mumbled into the futon as Dejun wiped over his side with an alcohol swab. He was shirtless at Dejun’s for what felt like the fiftieth time, surrounded by his precise color management, dozens upon dozens of plants, and so many dried herbs that his apartment straddled somewhere between dusty, earthy, and overly pungent. “And now he knows I’m hiding a spell.”

“You should have lied,” Dejun said, eyebrows raised, then crinkling like his advice was very sage and wise.

Sicheng scowled from where he lay half tilted, left side exposed to Dejun’s hands and methods. “I can’t. I’m bad at it.”

“Well, at least you didn’t cave,” Dejun continued. He reached for the copper plate next to his crossed legs and lifted a burning cigar of mugwort from it. This he moved over one of Sicheng’s cardinal points, holding it just close enough that Sicheng could feel its heat threatening the tiny hairs on his skin. They did this every time, but Sicheng still got a fleeting feeling of awe over Dejun being in his element.

“Cave to what?’ Sicheng grumbled, brushing that feeling aside. “I’m not caving to anything.”

“Sex, or something,” Dejun said, moving the mugwort to a different point and gently pushing at Sicheng’s clothed hip to tilt him. “Need I remind you that you can’t do it?”

Sicheng felt his ears burn, and he stuffed his face into the crease of his elbow. “No.”

“It would really fuck up the spell.”

“I _know.”_

Dejun hadn’t bothered telling him all this in the beginning because Sicheng did, in fact, know how spells worked and what kinds of activities would ruin the accruing energies. Hearing it now, when he’d already suffered the emotional whiplash and mockery from his own boyfriend, was worse.

“You probably shouldn’t kiss him either, really. You seem like the kind of person who would get hard from that.”

A whine of deep aggravation and humiliation slunk out between Sicheng’s teeth. “I’ll kill you.”

“That’d ruin the spell too.”

Sicheng flinched when he felt Dejun go from holding mugwort to pressing a hard spell stylus to his skin like he was scraping entire pathways through his epidermis. With it dragging over the fading lines Dejun had just boldened a few days ago, Sicheng’s body awoke and recalled a deep, unhappy muscular ache. 

Dejun wasn’t fixing him with a tattoo, exactly, though animatus spells were known to leave some rashes that could scar if the steps to create and use them weren’t done correctly. As of the two weeks the spell had been under process, Sicheng hadn’t yet felt any real agitation, but he hadn’t felt any connections or stirrings, either.

He wasn’t looking forward to that bit. Last time he’d used an animatus on his own body, he’d gotten phantom itches from the fashioned wings for two weeks past its use. That was back in school—a tangential aspect of his thesis studies, which had been about the connection between body mass concentrations and _qi._

At the time, he’d never imagined himself doing something like that again.

“You should be able to manifest them in a day or so,” Dejun murmured under his breath, and the stylus hurt the harder he dug it into his deliberate lines. Sicheng wasn’t used to it—the first time Dejun had drawn actual blood from the process, Sicheng had nearly punched him. “You’ll want to practice.”

Sicheng had known that, logically. He’d known the tentacles wouldn’t come naturally to him, just as the wings hadn’t. He’d had to change the density of his bones and wear a truly insane number of structural supports around his torso to keep his ribs and sternum from cracking. The tentacles weren’t supposed to be a legitimate danger to Sicheng’s bones, musculature, or organs, but they were limbs, and he would have to figure out how to work them.

The last thing he wanted to do was touch Yangyang prematurely like an amateu—

“Ai _ya!”_ Sicheng sucked in breath between his teeth and slapped the floor with the heel of his palm, eyes watering as a sharp sting needled between his ribs. He was sure Dejun hadn’t stabbed him, but it sure felt like it. “Dejun! Warn me!” he pled. 

Dejun chuckled, wiping at the blood over Sicheng’s ribs. The injury stung deeply against the alcohol, but was soothed by the tincture Sicheng had prepared himself that Dejun applied immediately after. “Here’s your warning,” he said. “This entire session’s going to hurt.”

Sicheng could feel his face set itself into a perma-scowl. When Dejun was finished, they’d have to realign his pathways. He’d have to meditate for an hour, probably. 

Animatus spells were surely one of the official courts of hell.

* * *

Not that everything else was much better, though Yangyang had, at least, mopped and cleaned his disaster up over the three or so hours Sicheng had been gone.

“Listen,” Yangyang began from the floor where he was straightening up over a bowl of lunch.

“No,” said Sicheng.

“If you listen, I’ll let you have some of my food,” Yangyang bargained. He looked better than he had in—well. Two weeks. About a week and a half if Sicheng had to wager, because the man had started to subdue himself around then. It wasn’t like Sicheng hadn’t seen it. He just hadn’t been sure what to do. How to approach it. How to make things easy for himself to deliver a gift he was truly sacrificing a stupid amount of comfort and sanity for.

“I’m not hungry.”

Yangyang’s face drooped into the wettest, most wicked puppy eyes Sicheng had ever seen.

“I’m not,” Sicheng said with more strength. He was in pain, actually, skin throbbing under his bandages, and he badly wanted to change out of his sweaty shirt. Any stronger pain medicines and it would throw everything they’d done out of alignment, so he’d just be suffering for the next 24 hours, approximately.

He ignored Yangyang’s expression and passed for the hallway.

“Fasting isn’t part of it, is it?” Yangyang asked, very obviously following him to the bedroom even though that was the last thing Sicheng wanted.

“Yes,” Sicheng lied.

“No it’s not,” Yangyang said, then hissed when he barely stopped Sicheng from closing the door by jamming his fingers in the gap. “Fuck,” he said, swinging the door open and leaning on the jamb with his long, thin legs and animated face. “Why are you so crabby?”

“Get out,” Sicheng nipped without patience, averting his eyes from him. “I need to change.”

“Oh shit,” Yangyang said, and Sicheng felt his stomach swoop as he reached for one of the middle drawers, and not in a good way. “It’s on your _body.”_

“Get out!” Sicheng snapped, indignant now, and didn’t even care that he shoved Yangyang hard enough to hurt a less resilient man. He kicked the door closed and heard Yangyang toss himself against it, then flop to the floor.

“What do you have to be so sexy for?” Yangyang cried, muffled through the wood. “What are you hiding? What is it? Sicheng, it’s for _me._ I want to _know.”_

“I don’t give a fuck what you want!” Sicheng cried back, pulling his shirt off all at once and drawing tears from his own eyes at the movement. He gasped from the pain of it and leaned on the dresser for a moment, dizzy again like he had been last night. Maybe that hadn’t been the fatigue.

“That’s not true and you know it,” Yangyang argued, always arguing, always clever.

Sicheng wanted to kiss him so badly it hurt more than his sides did. More than anything in that moment, he wished he could hold or be held or _something._ He was convinced this effort wasn’t worth it, and he’d never be doing something similar again. Not on his life.

“I don’t like you,” Sicheng muttered.

“What?”

“I said you’re _annoying!”_

For a second or two, there was only the erratic beating of Sicheng’s heart in response, plaintive and pathetic. And then:

“Damn, okay.”

He heard Yangyang get up. He knew Yangyang wasn’t actually upset—or was trusting that he wasn’t—but it hurt all the same for Sicheng, and that’s when he knew where this could go wrong.

Heaving in a few breaths after realizing that he was, yes, legitimately upset, he delicately pulled on a button-up and sat on the bed, crossing his legs and folding his hands in his lap.

He’d have to talk to Yangyang for real—tell him that he couldn’t go through with this if he kept nettling him. Because he was determined to do this, but he also missed the affection he was denying them both keenly.

If he loved Yangyang less, and certainly if he weren’t a witch, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be so bad. But he was off kilter and unbalanced, unable to sustain a smaller portion of his equilibrium that he’d come to rely upon.

Sex wasn’t just carnal, after all.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, he sat down at the kitchen table. Yangyang was reading and didn’t look up.

Sicheng wanted to carefully reach out and touch him, but was afraid of the rebound so soon after he’d had a small breakdown about it. Even post-meditating, he felt a bit raw.

“I’m in pain,” he said, and it felt like those words had been in his throat for weeks instead of minutes. Yangyang looked up from his book with a gaze that matched the tone Sicheng had set, honest and serious. “The spell hurts, and I need to focus until it’s done, and I’m already in this deep. Please let me finish it, otherwise these last two weeks will feel worthless.”

Yangyang considered him silently, lips thinned around the request. He had such a handsome face—clean or filthy, he was always handsome. There was always an edge of youth to his expressions, too, even when he was serious.

Sicheng felt the pull, felt the want, and gently tucked it away inside himself. Now that he knew he was weaker than he let on, the aching in his chest felt chasmic.

“Okay,” Yangyang said. “I’m sorry.”

He laid out his hand for Sicheng, an invitation for affection and connection, and Sicheng just had to shake his head. The idea was charged, now—it hadn’t been so dramatic when he wasn’t wrapped up in how much he wanted it.

Either way, Yangyang accepted the rejection easily. Sicheng had always been a bit picky about physical affection, after all, and Yangyang had always respected him when it mattered.

* * *

The days that stretched out felt unbearably slow and long.

Yangyang had returned to their bedroom at night, but respected the gap between them. He also left without a fuss whenever Sicheng asked him to, relaxed and casual even though Sicheng could see the way his eyes burned with curiosity. But Sicheng had to practice alone. He was committed to the secret.

It hurt, at first, to draw them out—like pulling a bone out of his body slowly, slowly, and it had left him sweating and gasping in the bathroom as spell matter leaked down his hips in hot tracks like tears. They were stiff and slow, and it was taxing to use them, but he had five days, and it got easier.

He had the longest bouts of practice time while Yangyang was out on mark hunts, chasing after reports of evil spirits and undead that customers brought to their front doors across countries. Sicheng had taken to catnapping throughout the day to get the dizzy spells to subside, but also to stay up and train while Yangyang was gone.

The day Sicheng got them moving fluidly, Yangyang was in Taiwan, where the skies were cloudy but bright with stars and moonlight.

The cup of ginger tea wobbled a little in the loop of yellow tentacle, thin but as strong as Sicheng was in holding it up. It was the balance that was tricky, the fine movements and delicacy that was giving him trouble. He didn’t want to stab Yangyang’s prostate. That was the least sexy thing he could imagine aside from suffocating his partner to death because he broke his windpipe.

The deeper he got into this, the more nervous he was to do it—and the more desperate he was to make it not a disaster. He’d put an insane amount of effort into a single outcome, and if this were a service, he’d be asking the customer to pay out the nose.

It was a very good thing that he had time to get used to them, though the days were dwindling. If he’d had to whip out and use the tentacles for the first time on their anniversary, not only would it have been a disaster, it would have been borderline horrific. Sicheng wasn’t sure how animatus shifus didn’t lose their minds at all the insane shit they could do to their body on a whim—for supposedly, they could, though Sicheng had never personally seen one do so—because he definitely had a breakdown.

The tentacles were exceptionally weird. 

At first he could only manifest the six tentacles about two inches out of his skin. They protruded from his sides and under his arms, and he couldn’t help but compare himself to monster stories told to children to spook them away from being naive and stupid. One slunk out of his seratus, the third from the dip of his waist, and the second midway between them. Pale yellow from the pinkish tips to nearly the base, they were wet and soft for the first few minutes, then got prickly and itchy the next, until finally they were dry and smooth. If he kept them out for too long, they would peel faintly at the tips like chapped lips.

They were bluish where they met his skin, which Dejun assured him (after assessing the success—or the damage) had more to do with Sicheng’s nature than anything else. “The yellow makes sense,” he’d said. “A lot of this is earth energy, and your lunar year could have something to do with the red, being, what? The fire ox?” Dejun had waved his hand, shrugging it off by the end and declaring the tentacles healthy like an obstetrician hefting a baby.

It had been nothing short of agony to push them out one by one, lengthening them bit by bit.

Holding a cup of tea was an enormous improvement.

The front door’s knob, turned to Germany’s black so Sicheng could enjoy the daylight, gave a fluttering click over to Taiwan’s blue.

Sicheng dropped the teacup.

He fumbled to grab it with his hands as the tentacles lashed back into his body with a dizzying, horrifically wet lurch, but he wasn’t a graceful person when startled. He knocked the simple cup, spattering hot tea across his bare chest. It then clattered against the countertop and toppled over a fresh bottle of ginseng tonic, which he lashed out to grab before it fell into the sink and lost its contents down the drain.

The door opened.

Wild-eyed, Sicheng turned his face toward Yangyang, emerged from the darkness into the lit house.

“Oh, _whoa,”_ said Yangyang, absolutely plastered with grime as usual while Sicheng dripped spell discharge and ginger, knuckles white around the bottle. “You’re shirtless,” he mumbled lamely, and then his eyes widened upon realizing. His hand darted up to shield his own gaze, shoulders hunching inward as if to protect himself from Sicheng’s exposure—marked as Sicheng was by vivid spell lines all up and down his visible side and portions of his back. “Good evening,” he choked, because they’d been awkwardly formal the past few days, and stumbled into the house.

As soon as Yangyang was in the hallway and out of sight, Sicheng laughed. He grabbed for his T-shirt to tuck under his arm so that when Yangyang inevitably heard him, he wouldn’t see anything from peeking.

Lightheaded with a headache to boot, when Yangyang did indeed immediately show his face around the corner with a breathless sort of yearning, Sicheng hid the flush on his face with his tea-stained hand out of shy necessity.

“I miss you,” Yangyang said, earnest and quiet and low so that the words hit Sicheng’s belly instead of his heart where it would hurt.

“Don’t tell me that right now,” Sicheng protested. “You look disgusting.”

Yangyang stuck out his tongue at the mature age of twenty-seven. “Wouldn’t make a difference,” he said. “You gotta keep your distance anyway.”

Sicheng raised the bottle of ginseng as a threat, and Yangyang gave a little muted cackle before disappearing back into the hallway.

Sicheng’s sides ached.

* * *

When he woke in the morning with a groan, Yangyang was there on the other side of the bed, tucked up under the blankets with his face half-smushed into the pillow and one dark and pretty eye gazing at Sicheng like a creep.

He had the right, as his long-term boyfriend, but it still made Sicheng cringe.

Yangyang resettled his face so he could look at Sicheng with both eyes, which was less unnerving but more embarrassing. Sicheng didn’t doubt that he looked terrible—his under-eye bags had been a feat lately.

“When is the spell stabilized?” Yangyang mumbled with his grumbly morning voice, two complete feet between them that made Sicheng’s right side feel very cold. He couldn’t do anything but sleep on his back lately or he wouldn’t sleep at all.

“Today, hopefully,” Sicheng admitted. “But I still need to practice.”

“Practice what?” Yangyang attempted, and Sicheng gave him a tired, dry look in response. The little huff Yangyang gave in turn made him smile, though. “Will I be able to touch you?”

That question gave Sicheng pause. He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and gnawed at the flakes of skin as dawn leaked through East China’s window. Clients would start knocking, soon. “I don’t trust myself,” he replied finally.

“Trust me, then,” Yangyang said. “Trust me. I’ll be careful.”

Sicheng hummed and shook his head, drawing his gaze up toward the ceiling so Yangyang couldn’t use his puppy eyes on him. “I do, but I shouldn’t.”

“Sicheng,” Yangyang coaxed. “I _miss_ you.”

“It’s just two more days,” Sicheng blurted back. “Just two. You can handle it.”

This huff Yangyang gave didn’t make Sicheng smile. It was annoyed again, frustrated, but Yangyang would get over it. “This is the worst edging of my life,” Yangyang muttered, sounding mutinous as he rolled out of bed.

It would have been funny if Sicheng didn’t feel the same.

* * *

This time, Dejun came to him, but it was only because he was picking up his “payment,” more or less, which took the form of a powdered base of that selfsame tincture Sicheng had prepared for the concrete process.

Dejun passed his hands over Sicheng’s naked sides, then thumbed at the sensitive bases of the tentacles when Sicheng pulled them out. Dejun held them, did his silent assessments as he checked their flow, and finally said, “I think they’re stable.”

“You think,” Sicheng clarified.

“They’re stable,” Dejun corrected. “You’d have to dismantle the spell to get rid of them, now, or just wait until the moon hits this same phase again. Then it’ll start weakening on its own.”

“Right,” Sicheng said. They’d gone over this before.

“Are you ever going to tell me what you’re doing this for?”

_Over my dead body._

“No,” Sicheng said. That was what the payment was for, actually, because Dejun and he were close enough to do each other high-effort favors like this for nothing in return at all—except when Sicheng was keeping secrets. Though he was a terrible liar, he had a will of steel, and Dejun demanded recompense for the injury of that denial.

Sicheng was surrounded by dramatic people.

If he were a lesser man, this plan would have already fallen apart.

Dejun gave a miffed grumble, collecting his bag, the pot of powder, and what was probably his general feeling of being used, then exited the bedroom as Sicheng wiped down his sides and shrugged on a shirt. He still felt woozy whenever he activated or withdrew the spell, but that was to be expected. It wasn’t like he had an overflowing source of vitality. He was still human.

The window behind him to the side of the bed was his only warning that Yangyang had arrived, going from East China mid-daylight to just an hour down, the sun’s angle changing suddenly and bursting into a clear Korean sky from China’s dotted blue.

Sicheng buttoned up his shirt with spell-clumsy fingers, ears straining to hear, wary of what Yangyang would say.

Yangyang’s voice sounded surprised and warm, and Sicheng’s heart panged from the chirpiness of it. He pushed himself to his feet, reaching for the door and catching “Yeah totally. That stuff rocks. Are you free next week? You’ve been so fucking busy—” and Dejun’s earthy voice cutting in, “Yeah, I’m free.”

“Your schedule, not mine,” Yangyang reminded him. “You’re the one with a day job.”

“Right—”

Sicheng pulled himself into the hallway. “Bye, Dejun!” he called, trying to push him out of the door now instead of later.

Yangyang caught sight of him from where he stood at the end and gave him a Look. A kind of tightening around the corner of his eyes that had Sicheng wanting to slink out the bedroom window.

“Bye,” Dejun called back, somewhere between amused and slighted. With a change of daylight and the click of the door, Dejun was gone.

Yangyang stood there, simply processing the empty entrance. He was dressed in a pale blue, oversized pullover and black jeans. He had a new haircut, his fringe straight-cut and just touching his cheekbones in soft black.

Sicheng’s heart gave another empty pang.

“Dejun was doing it, wasn’t he?” Yangyang said slowly, and his voice made Sicheng feel like his boyfriend was creeping closer even as he stayed put.

“Doing what,” Sicheng deadpanned, and Yangyang’s eyes narrowed into a perfect critique.

“You don’t do animatus. Dejun does,” Yangyang said, shrewder by the second.

“I’ve done animatus,” Sicheng defended.

Sicheng watched as conclusions started looping in and out of Yangyang’s brain, then clicked with a tiny look of horror. “Does he know it’s for _sex?”_ Yangyang wheezed, craning his neck as if he could look out the front door’s tiny window.

“When have I ever given the impression I would willingly talk about my sex life with anyone but my partner?” Sicheng scolded. He rolled shoulders back before he remembered his sore sides with a wince.

For a beat, Yangyang simply stared at him. It gave Sicheng an appropriate sense of impending doom. 

_“Including_ your partner,” Yangyang retorted.

“It’s a day and a half!” Sicheng objected, immediately fired up.

“It’s _agony,”_ Yangyang said. “Look at this!” He gestured to the space between them and made a frustrated, if not disgusted, noise. “The spell’s stabilized, right? You can still _fuck me,_ Sicheng. I can wait for a surprise.”

Hearing it this time, proposed this way, made Sicheng’s gut lurch.

It was reasonable.

He wanted it.

But he didn’t like the thought of Yangyang winning.

So he leveled Yangyang with a look and his chin raised.

And forced Yangyang to come to him, turning his back for the bedroom.

“You’re not allowed to look at the spell lines,” he informed him as he made for the bed, then heard a tiny, incredulous, “Fuck,” from Yangyang before there was the sound of slippers running on the hallway floor.

Yangyang hit his shoulder on the doorway just as Sicheng shrugged back out of his shirt.

The touch of cool, familiar hands and the tickle of Yangyang’s sleeves on his waist turned the entire expanse of Sicheng’s aching skin into a single wave of shivers. Yangyang’s lips slid against the curve of his neck with a thin exhale as Sicheng leaned into him and felt the first splash of air through his chest in weeks.

“You’re impossible,” Yangyang whispered on his mouth’s way to Sicheng’s ear. It bid another shiver down Sicheng’s spine, and he tilted his neck, eyelids drooping.

“You’re going to love it,” Sicheng breathed as Yangyang moved his palms over his abdomen and spread the tips of his fingers against the waistband of his trousers. “I hope.”

Yangyang’s laugh lit small fires across Sicheng’s jaw, and Sicheng caved, turning to meet Yangyang’s kiss in the middle.

* * *

Sicheng kicked him out for the evening of the last day, sending him to take care of the medium-tier mark he’d had on the backburner for a while now.

“Take your time,” he told Yangyang, and Yangyang stood outside the front door on the step of their Taiwanese western plains entrance with sad, sad eyes. “Oh please.”

“What’re you gonna do while I’m gone?” Yangyang started to pout, and Sicheng rolled his eyes. “It’s sexy, isn’t it?”

“Have fun,” Sicheng said mercilessly, kicked Yangyang’s boot out of the way of the closing door, and snorted at Yangyang’s bereaved sigh just as the door clicked.

Ideally, it was going to be sexy. If everything went well, it would be just sexy enough to give Sicheng a steady green light on his own end, though they’d have to do some negotiation on their anniversary anyway after he opened the pandora’s box of his underarms.

After drinking a cup and a half of water from the kitchen, Sicheng retreated to the bedroom and drew the curtains. He shoved out of his clothes, gathered the lube, lay back against their bed blankets with a towel under his ass, and counted a few breaths as he gazed at the ceiling.

It took him a moment to drag them out, if only because he’d only ever been a practical masturbator. Whatever deep imaginative fantasies he might be able to conjure up in the pits of his brain tended to fade and crumble as soon as he put his hand on his dick. His brain just didn’t find application via his own hands on his own body very sexy.

He expected disappointment with the tentacles, but they also felt just foreign enough that he might manage to either be thoroughly freaked out by the end of this experimentation or very muddled and sated.

He wasn’t keen on the idea of fumbling around Yangyang’s body with these until he tried them on himself. It seemed like the best test of competency while staying within the bounds of monogamy.

It was an experiment, and he rolled the dice with the uncapping of the lube.

Closing his eyes for the first moments, he let out a tense breath upon the pressure of manifesting all six tentacles, as thin as half his wrist, still soft and squashy, and about as sensitive as the skin of his palm. He slid his hands over them, giving them the bottom two a reasonable layer of lube while he tried to calm his heart.

As embarrassing as it was, he tried to mimic Yangyang’s patterns—the way he tended to start at Sicheng’s hips with his mouth and the juts of bone at his pelvis, slowly working inward with wet kisses while his hands touched down the soft skin of Sicheng’s inner thighs. He wasn’t a biter down there except when they were both getting mean in bed. Sicheng liked both. He liked being patterned with the pinches and divots of Yangyang’s pretty teeth as well as the soft, indulgent mouthing, but all the tentacles could manage was warm, slick strokes like two tongues, running shudders down from the tops of his thighs to his toes.

He exhaled his first puff of weirdness, tense and unsure as he touched himself with these . . . things.

They’d been oddly comprehensible as limbs to his mind from the beginning. His brain had roughly known how to move them and had latched on to learning finite movements, but he could still only work in broad strokes.

Sicheng wrinkled his nose and lifted his knees upon pressing the drying tip of one tentacle to his perineum.

He reapplied lube and tried again, this time holding one of the middle tentacles with his free hand as if for comfort.

His dick was only feebly aroused, showing interest, but only nervously.

Sicheng opened his eyes, cringed, and closed them again.

He soldiered on, applying one tip to his right nipple and the other upper tentacle to stroke soft and dry over his neck. It was a multitasking feat, and it wasn’t easy to keep more than two tentacles moving at a time.

What he wanted to be a gentle nudge to his anus ended up being a bold prod, and he grimaced in his own darkness.

Again, he forced himself to think of Yangyang.

Completely drunk on renewed proximity, Yangyang had been a darling disaster the night before. Sloppy and kind in an effort to be gathered instead of excited, he’d tried taking his time while loving on Sicheng and had ended up laughing over his collar bones after coming while giving, of all things. He’d bit kisses down the thin skin of Sicheng’s sternum, sucking on his nipples until they were tender, and apologized his way into taking cock.

Sicheng made a noise of protest at his own actions as soon as he tried pressing a tentacle in past his sphincter.

He’d become good at relaxing enough in habit to usually not need much prep, but nearly three weeks of celibacy did things to a man.

Yangyang had needed more extensive prep than usual last night as well.

Sicheng reached down with his hand and worked himself through it.

Fingers busy, he opened his eyes again and lifted his head, forcing himself to take stock instead of chickening out like he didn’t have kinks as hard as this.

That ushered in the thought of Yangyang’s hands, which in turn led his dick to show interest in the wrong thing.

Shoving those thoughts aside, he parted his lips to taste the soft tip of a clean tentacle. Skin fresh, less silky and soft than a dick, but still inoffensive enough to take deeper. He sucked on it for the novelty and found himself back up against the wall of vague self-repulsion.

If not repulsion, then confusion. Why bother with this when he had a stinky hunter he could kiss?

He pried himself open enough to take his most time- and energy-intensive dildo up his ass, re-lubed and slender, and pushed that tentacle in slowly, further and further until it started getting uncomfortable at both ends—at the tentacle’s root where it began to discharge magic for the strain and at the tip, where his rectum was protesting.

With his eyes closed again, he prostate-massaged his way into his dick’s favor, sucking on one tentacle absently and trying to multitask with the others.

By the end of it, he gained the most high-effort orgasm he’d ever been forced to entertain and a slew of ideas and gameplans for Yangyang—all of which he hoped would be exciting and worth it.

* * *

Yangyang slid into bed smelling of bergamot and tangerine floating above his usual clean shower scents, and Sicheng, drowsy, reached for him. “Safe?”

“I got a bit nicked,” Yangyang admitted in the dark.

“Where?” Sicheng mumbled, fingers searching across the soft bare skin of Yangyang’s chest.

“I took an elixir when I came in,” Yangyang assured him, and Sicheng could see it in his mind—had seen it before. Yangyang coming home and going straight for the cabinets, breathing a little tight, face too serious, and knocking back one of the vials Sicheng always kept full. 

Yangyang took up Sicheng’s wrist to guide him up to his far shoulder. There was a thin layer of dressing over a wound Sicheng obviously wouldn’t press his fingers into, but he traced his touch up to Yanyang’s neck and tugged him in.

The kiss was brief and minty, clumsy in the dark, but sweet, and sufficient to fall asleep to.

* * *

There was a sense of dreadful deja vu when Sicheng woke up without Yangyang in bed with him. He was stunned for a moment as morning leaked through under the curtains and he got only a faceful of Yangyang’s pillow smelling of cheap pomegranate. 

His searching hand crinkled over a small piece of paper on the empty bed, and he lifted it to his bleary eyes.

A pink paper heart.

Sicheng laughed out of a complicated swirl of emotions—embarrassment, endearment, annoyance over how cheesy it was. That last one was heavily superseded by the first two.

He crawled out of bed and smelled something in the air. His insides pinched, and he closed his eyes, and he swore that if Yangyang was really making an official breakfast, he wouldn’t turtle up into an emotionless husk to escape his own affection.

The client doorbell rang while Sicheng was pulling on his last button-up—he’d worn all the other ones—and Sicheng watched as the sky switched to the paler, earlier dawn of West China.

“We’re not open today,” he heard Yangyang say as he shuffled into the hallway. “We’ll be back to normal hours tomorrow.”

“I just need—”

“No, really,” said Yangyang. “Please come back tomorrow. We’ll take care of your request first thing.”

Sicheng watched from the hallway as Yangyang gave a small courtesy bow paired with a soft mumble, and then the door was closing. Yangyang turned it back east then pivoted to immediately rush back to the kitchen. He did a double take and deliberately paused to reach for a kiss from Sicheng. “Happy fourth,” Yangyang mumbled against his lips.

It left his mouth tingling.

“Breakfast, really?” Sicheng asked as Yangyang shed the polite robe he’d probably tossed on for the visitor and resumed his station at the stove.

“Why?” asked Yangyang, applying a spatula to the pan. “Did you have plans?”

“No,” Sicheng admitted. The tentacle plan was about as elaborate as it got with him, and it was just one complex item on a single list.

“Worried I’m going to make your gift inferior?” Yangyang teased, and flipped something folded onto a plate. “Good.”

Sicheng gave a hiss of disapproval even as he appraised the bare lines of Yangyang’s back, tracing the elaborate spell tattoo of Yangyang’s crossbow, then the light bandages taped over his shoulder. He’d always been very lean and skinny, but it looked good on him, and he had some nice proportions.

Not all bog monsters were so lucky.

“Is it going to poison me?” Sicheng asked amidst his appreciation.

“I practiced,” Yangyang promised, a new layer of batter softly sizzling in the pan. He turned for Sicheng, palms leaned back on the cool tile of the counters. “Visited my mom a couple times over the past week. It’s—” And then he said something very German and not at all Mandarin. He gave a laugh at the microexpression Sicheng must have pulled. “Thin pancakes,” Yangyang explained. “They’re good with jams and stuff. Look, I bought some.”

He gestured to a small collection of bottles on the counter, which was more clear than usual. Another point in the Yangyang box, though Sicheng hoped he’d be able to find everything without fuss that he’d tidied away.

All the labels were in the German or English alphabet, so Sicheng popped the lids and investigated each while Yangyang trickled a hand over Sicheng’s neck as he watched the pan. He recognized the nutella on sight, but the rest were a guessing game. “Fig?”

“Uh,” Yangyang murmured, gently flipping the pancake. “Probably.”

“Are these basically crepes?”

“Basically, but _German,”_ Yangyang said, and then proceeded to say something else in that selfsame language that Sicheng only ever wanted to kiss off his lips.

He rarely would translate when Sicheng asked, so Sicheng didn’t bother, tucking his chin over Yangyang’s uninjured shoulder instead. “Do you have other plans I don’t know about?” he asked as Yangyang found Sicheng’s arm and tugged it around his waist.

“I thought we could order from some place for lunch and dinner,” Yangyang said. “Like, I don’t feel like cooking all day.”

“No,” Sicheng agreed.

“And I have my own gift to give you.”

“What is it?”

Yangyang gave him what would have been a scathing look if he weren’t still a little sleep-ruffled and seemingly quite happy. “I’m giving it to you at the end of the day to make _you_ wait this time because you _suck.”_

At that, Sicheng chuckled and latched his mouth to Yangyang’s neck, giving it a good bite. Yangyang shoved him off with a wiggle of his shoulder and his soft, sweet, drowsy look turning belligerently mutinous at the reminder of his own suffering.

“Breakfast looks good,” Sicheng said, contentedly moving to clear off the table.

“It better,” Yangyang grumbled.

* * *

It tasted good, too, and Yangyang was back to good spirits when Sicheng took his first bite and called it “tasty” in garbled English.

Yangyang started getting restless leg under the table, though, by the time Sicheng was on his third pancake. Eyes starting to stay down, Yangyang ate in sort of lagging jumps. One very quick bite with overzealous chewing. A slow, slow cutting of a new piece. A long pause. A small flick of his eyes up to see where Sicheng was at in his meal. Rinse and repeat.

Sicheng wasn't trying to eat slowly, but apparently his pace was agony nonetheless.

“What if I just,” Sicheng began between pancake and a swig of milk, “take a long shower after eating and make you wait even more.”

Yangyang practically threw his back out over his chair, slippers coming down on the ground with an oppositional slap. “Hng— _don’t!_ You’re killing me!”

Again, Sicheng laughed to contrast the beginnings of performance anxiety in his gut, and Yangyang, refusing to look at him at all now, stuffed the rest of his third pancake in his mouth and got up to clean.

A smudge of nutella remained at the corner of his mouth.

* * *

All teasing aside, they did each spend some time in the bathroom getting ready, though. They could do impromptu sex, but there was too much expectation tied to this one, and aside from the normal pre-intercourse preparatory nonsense, Sicheng had to get his heart under wraps.

He tried to summon the image of Yangyang enjoying it into his mind, Yangyang overwhelmed, Yangyang in flushed pleasure. But Sicheng’s hands were cold and nervous, and he wished this felt less like a big deal.

When he reached the bedroom, Yangyang’s knee was bouncing where he sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. The towels were already laid out, lube and a condom ready, and a tissue box and some toys nervously set out at the side of the mattress as if Yangyang wanted to be sure they were prepared for anything.

Yangyang gave him big eyes when Sicheng entered the room. Big, nervous, needy, excited, and trying to be sexy but looking nothing short of desperate.

“You want some foreplay first or do you want to get freaked out now?”

“Freaked out?” Yangyang asked, then breathed a short “Oh my god,” in English.

Sicheng fiddled with the buttons of his shirt as Yangyang’s eyes went elsewhere, brain visibly scrambling.

“Now?” Yangyang said tentatively. “I just—it’s killing me.”

“So you’ve said,” Sicheng replied and steeled himself as he unbuttoned his shirt. “We have to negotiate anyway.”

“Oh my god,” Yangyang repeated. “Fuck. What is it?”

The babbling caused a smile to hook into Sicheng’s mouth through the anxiety as he reached the last button and shrugged his shirt off to his wrists. He tugged at the sleeves, trying to make his steadying breaths as quiet as he could, and tossed the shirt to the foot of the bed where Yangyang immediately put his hand on it, scrunching his fingers into the fabric.

A timid fever was working its way through Sicheng’s legs as Yangyang’s knee started bouncing again.

“You’ve . . .” Sicheng started then stopped, lifting his elbows so Yangyang could see the scrawling etches, the tight lines and concentric circles, hand-drawn, intricate, professional. Dejun really was remarkable. “You’ve only talked about them a few times.”

“Talked about _what?”_ Yangyang mumbled, distracted, eyes running up and down across the tan patterning. He would know it wasn’t another tattoo—Sicheng had plenty of those. He could almost feel his clock ticking against his pulse. “Sicheng, I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t know why you thought I would know what this spell is,” he mumbled, sounding desperate now as the growing tension made him scrunch Sicheng’s shirt in more demanding pulses. “It’s pretty,” he supposed.

Sicheng wanted to cover his face as he tightened his lungs through an exhale. He felt the six spell points sting and narrow, then give, and he kept his eyes on Yangyang’s face. For a moment, Yangyang looked like he was going to continue running his own mouth out of nerves, and then his lips stayed parted.

He stared as Sicheng drew them out, only as fast as he could manage, centimeter by centimeter.

“What the fuck,” Yangyang said in English, and then the yellow continued to extend and something in Yangyang’s mind almost palpably clicked. “Holy _shit.”_

Sicheng gave a wheezy little laugh as Yangyang scrambled to his feet, face flushed and hands reaching. This time, Yangyang’s touch was warm on his belly, hesitating there as he watched Sicheng extend the tentacles to their comfortable limits—just about as long as his own arms.

“Jesus, what the fuck,” Yangyang mumbled. “Can I touch them?”

“Yeah,” Sicheng barely managed, bracing himself. He closed his eyes for the contact and couldn’t curb a shudder as Yangyang slid his fingers between the two bottom bases on either side—right up against his magic-slick skin. It was hot there from the activated spell, and Yangyang’s touch was magnetic. He could almost feel the energy sizzling against his waist, heat rushing to his head.

“Does it hurt?” Yangyang whispered, touch turning careful as he drifted the back of a finger down the length of one like stroking the cheek of a baby. Sicheng found that he was more sensitive than he had been by his own hands, gooseflesh cascading across the skin of his abdomen.

Sicheng shook his head no, then tried to be less mute. “Not—no. They’re stable. They hurt only for those first two days or so.”

The tiny, soft kiss Yangyang touched to his chin caught Sicheng utterly by surprise, and his eyes shot open to look down the short distance where Yangyang was staring at him with unveiled wonder. “You’re so cool,” Yangyang told him, and Sicheng felt a flush wash all the way up from his chest to his face. “I didn’t know you could do this.”

“It took three weeks,” Sicheng mumbled, embarrassed.

Yangyang reached up one hand, cupped the back of Sicheng’s neck, and kissed him full on the mouth.

Sicheng, tense to the bone and too anxious to have a handle on his reactions, melted. His head fizzled and spun as Yangyang stroked his free hand down the softened length of a middle tentacle and thumbed at the tip. He gently worked his way back to the base with inching fingers as his mouth rolled Sicheng’s bottom lip between his teeth and sucked. Sicheng barely kept his head—barely stifled a moan that he would have never expected. He’d thought this would be clumsy and awkward, and it probably still would be, but he was already drowning in the attention.

Sicheng pulled back from the kiss, light-headed, and knocked their foreheads together as Yangyang sucked in a low, unsteady breath. “Happy anniversary.”

“Yeah,” Yangyang said dumbly. “No kidding. I’m reeling. What do they _feel_ like?”

“Fucking weird,” Sicheng said, and Yangyang tilted out of his space and laughed, loud and shocked. The next kiss was fierce and pressured, and Sicheng’s blood was rushing in disastrous directions.

“What can you do with them?” Yangyang breathed against his mouth the next second, tracing his fingers in circles around their bases and making Sicheng’s nipples go hard from just that alone.

“I—” Sicheng drew breath, trying to steady the rocket pulse of his heart. “—fucked myself with them?”

“You _what?”_ Yangyang took an automatic step back, a rush of cold sucking down Sicheng’s half-naked body. But his hands were out from his sides like Sicheng had electrocuted him, eyes wide and a blush staining his neck. “You f—you— _Sicheng!”_

“I had to—I had to check that I could—”

“You’re _so_ hot. Jesus fucking _christ,_ Sicheng!” Yangyang’s hands met Sicheng’s face, which was burning deeply, and held him, pulled him down, made him stumble forward and finally touch Yangyang’s narrow hips.

Sicheng loved how Yangyang’s upper lip was heavier than his bottom one, the gentle tip of his nose, his deeply creased eyelids that gave his gazes another kind of dimension. Yangyang kissed him and he wanted to unravel with relief.

They ran through a slew of questions—so many of them, but Yangyang was always an earnestly interested person. “Does it feel good for me to touch them? Was it hard to fuck yourself? Can you fuck _me?”_ he asked breathlessly as Sicheng pushed Yangyang’s pajama bottoms and boxers off his hips.

“What do you think I did this for?” Sicheng shot back, blood thrumming wildly at the sight of Yangyang’s half-mast cock.

Yangyang made a near-strangled noise, ran his hands through his hair a few times, and dropped to his knees on the bed, hands outstretched to tug at the backs of Sicheng’s knees. “Come here, come here,” he pled, sounding overwhelmed.

“We should negotiate.”

“Green,” Yangyang said desperately.

It startled a laugh out of Sicheng, mottled by a choked stutter when Yangyang tugged him close enough to wrap his lips around the head of Sicheng’s cock and go straight for the edges of his foreskin with his tongue. _“No,”_ Sicheng reprimanded as Yangyang gazed up at Sicheng with dark, blown eyes. “Red,” he said firmly, and Yangyang popped his mouth off his crown with a tiny whine. _“Shǎguā,”_ he called him, a warm reprimand this time, and Yangyang ran his hands up and down Sicheng’s outer thighs against the grain of his hair, knuckles grazing the relaxed tentacles.

“What’s there to negotiate?” Yangyang said, irresponsible and wicked. “I want you to fuck my brains out.”

Sicheng blushed and pushed at Yangyang’s head, shoving it to the side. Yangyang gave a breathless giggle.

“Really,” Yangyang tried again. “Really. You can do anything. Choke me. I don’t fucking care right now. If I realize I don’t like something I’ll tap out with my hands or say yellow.”

“Or red.”

“Or red,” Yangyang agreed.

“You could tell me what to do,” Sicheng suggested, trying to coax Yangyang into a proper plan. “This is your fantasy—not mine.”

“Yeah,” Yangyang said numbly, eyes going distant again, and then he snapped back. “Okay.”

“And I’ll do what you ask if I’m comfortable with it.”

“Okay.”

Tentatively, Sicheng lowered himself onto the bed, and Yangyang scrambled to make room. “When we’re in the swing of things, maybe I’ll try some ideas.” Of which he only had a few, and he had a feeling Yangyang would ask for them regardless.

Yangyang nodded, eyes riveted on Sicheng’s, and his tongue darted out to wet his drying lips.

“I can’t multitask well, okay?” Sicheng told him, tilting his head a little to see if Yangyang’s eyes would track him—if he was really as riveted as he seemed. Yangyang did indeed track him, devout in his attention. “I’m still human.”

“I’m going to piss myself,” Yangyang blurted, and it ripped a laugh right out of Sicheng’s chest.

“Is your shoulder okay?” was Sicheng’s last box to tick, and Yangyang blinked. 

As if startled out of his reverie, his eyes cleared. “Wah,” he breathed. “I forgot.”

“Let’s keep you off your right side,” Sicheng said.

Yangyang scrubbed over his face with his hands, wrestled his neatly-cut hair back and out of his eyes, and nodded with a sense of finality. Mindful of his shoulder, he laid himself on his back, head hitting the pillow.

For a moment, Sicheng let him collect himself and watched the fevered rise and fall of his chest slow to a gentle rock.

“Okay,” said Yangyang. “Okay. I’m ready. Can we start normally? Just kissing and stuff?”

Sicheng felt those words viscerally soften his insides. He crawled over to Yangyang and settled his knees on either side of his hips, giving him a firm nod.

Yangyang brought him down to earth with his hands, cradling his jaw and neck, and kissed him slow and deep. Sicheng could feel his tentacles droop down onto the blankets, caging them in while he kept his elbows on either side of Yangyang’s head and mapped his mouth and lips all over again as if scared he would ever forget his sharp incisors.

Slowly, Yangyang worked his hands down from Sicheng’s face to his pecs, running his callused fingers over his nipples gently and drawing out those sighs Sicheng couldn’t help when he thumbed at them. Down the soft crease of his abdomen and into the divots of his hips, the smooth, searching touches of Yangyang’s hand across his dick and holding his balls, fingertips skimming his perineum.

It sloughed shivers up and down Sicheng’s skin, but he liked the way Yangyang searched his body like a meditory prayer and the rough texture of his hands.

Yangyang leaned his head back deeper into the pillow as he skated his knuckles down Sicheng’s inner thighs. “Can I have one in my mouth? Do they taste okay?”

“Like skin,” Sicheng mumbled, moving his mouth to Yangyang’s ear and enjoying the way he immediately shuddered. He watched in his periphery so he didn’t accidentally nudge Yangyang in the eye, but brought a top tentacle up to Yangyang’s face as he mouthed at his earlobe.

Yangyang took the tip between his lips and sucked in right as he reached up and placed his hand around Sicheng’s cock. Sicheng swore he saw spots for a moment as nerves he didn’t remember having rushed a crack of pleasure through that tentacle and up his spine, arcing straight up the back curve of his skull.

He, too, shuddered as Yangyang very gently tested his teeth against the flesh and breathed through his nose, sucking with the muscle of his tongue and swallowing down saliva with the bob of his adam’s apple.

Sicheng grazed his teeth over the shell of Yangyang’s ear and watched his eyes blank out, throat flinching. When Yangyang gathered his wits again, he thumbed at Sicheng’s slit and gave a little sound of retribution when Sicheng breathed a puff of air into his ear.

Gently, Sicheng tightened the muscles of the tentacle in Yangyang’s mouth and pushed down against Yangyang’s tongue. Yangyang’s whole body tensed, his inhale fluttered, and then he whined with a plea, tugging on Sicheng’s cock and bringing his other hand up to Sicheng’s nape and pulling.

There were a few ways Yangyang could ask for more with his mouth busy, and that was basically all three of them.

As carefully as Sicheng could manage while still giving results, he moved the tentacle deeper into Yangyang’s mouth and watched his breath actively escalate, fingers pulsing in the hold he had on Sicheng’s hair as the tugging lit fires down Sicheng’s spine. Yangyang loosened his jaw, mouth big and pretty, and whined again when Sicheng pushed deeper, knee popping up dangerously close to Sicheng’s balls between his legs.

Without ado and for plenty of reasons, Sicheng sat on Yangyang’s thighs, dick knocking up against Yangyang’s erection, Yangyang’s cockhead peeking out from under the hood. Sicheng kept pushing the tentacle until he felt Yangyang’s throat constrict and heard his breathing stagger, then let up gently, sliding out two inches while Yangyang heaved breath through his nose.

Yangyang lifted a hand to tug on the tentacle, freeing up his mouth with a pop. “Did you do this to yourself?” he rasped. “It’s so—it’s so good. My head’s swimming.”

“You’re insane,” Sicheng said lightly as Yangyang coughed and sucked drool back into his mouth from the corners of his lips.

“I want you to fuck me at both ends,” Yangyang said, not even entertaining Sicheng’s tease. “You’re got _six_ of these. That’s so many.” He propped himself up onto his elbows, blinking through a haze of excitement. “Do you think I can fit two in my mouth?”

“That’s gotta be what it’s so big for,” answered Sicheng, and Yangyang just laughed, reaching for Sicheng’s second upper tentacle and running it through the loop of his fingers. Sicheng shivered, which earned him an interested look from Yangyang that was only diverted by the way he squeezed the lengths of two tentacles together.

“Does that hurt?” Yangyang checked, and Sicheng shook his head. Even less freshly sprouted, the tentacles remained soft and forgiving, though they maintained enough shape to fuck with. His nerves were gentle along each length, too, receptive to Yangyang’s slight squeeze but not agitated. Yangyang brought them closer to his lips, took a deep breath, then mumbled with reservations, “This is so thick.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Yangyang sniffed then showed his teeth in a pleasant smile, ebbed by a small laugh. “When I get these in my mouth, can you touch me?”

“How?” Sicheng prodded, which ushered a vague tint of color in Yangyang’s face—shy, at times.

“Mm,” he attempted, then, “Kissing my chest? And prepping me. If that’s not too much.” He sucked in a breath when Sicheng reached down and cupped his balls, flicking his fingers back to trace the edge of his pucker, clean and dry.

“Let’s get you a pillow,” Sicheng suggested, which prompted Yangyang to let go of the tentacles so they could cover Sicheng’s pillow with a towel and hitch Yangyang’s hips up with it. They readjusted until Yangyang was comfortable, still flush across his chest, and Sicheng moved so he was knelt to Yangyang’s left side and could give soft pinches to the skin around Yangyang’s iliac furrow. “Good?”

Yangyang nodded and reached for the first two tentacles again, but not before leaning up for a wet and almost nervous kiss. It went from there, Yangyang starting with carefully fitting two tentacles between his lips and giving a groan at the stretch, Sicheng watching as his jaw flexed and relaxed.

Sicheng grazed his fingertips down that tight jawline, pinching Yangyang’s chin with his thumb and forefinger and drawing it further down as Yangyang gave a little gasp and swallowed down saliva. Sicheng started to push, and Yangyang gave an almost plaintive whine, eyelashes fluttering. He reached for Sicheng’s neck, and Sicheng lowered his head down to Yangyang’s chest, giving him access to his hair while he brushed his lips across Yangyang’s pec.

Direct contact with Yangyang’s nipples wasn’t very effective, but he tended to shiver and tense whenever he traced around them in dry, soft loops or nipped the slopes of his lean muscles. He kept one hand firmly on Yangyang’s chest and began drifting the other down his abdomen, plucking gently at the unclipped pubic hairs past his navel, and palming over his hardened shaft.

Again Yangyang whined, tugging at Sicheng’s roots just enough to make him nip under his collar bone and cause a little flinch through Yangyang’s body. Sicheng reached and rubbed his dry fingertip against Yangyang’s anus and listened to his breath shudder, the sounds of him swallowing and swallowing again.

Blindly, Sicheng used his four unoccupied tentacles to search for the lube as he held his mouth over Yangyang’s nipple and let his hot breath skate over his skin. Yangyang tried to take the tentacles deeper into his mouth and scratched ever so slightly at Sicheng’s scalp when the cap of the lube popped.

In some ways, Sicheng missed Yangyang’s smart mouth, but it was a delight to hear him whimper and stretch out his toes, spreading his knees wider at the touch of Sicheng’s lubed-up middle finger. Yangyang took him in at an inch easily, then slowly relaxed enough for his entire finger, giving a throaty, desperate groan as Sicheng dragged his long touch over the surface of Yangyang’s prostate—just enough pressure to deserve that reaction.

Sicheng latched his mouth over the thuds of Yangyang’s heart and began to suck as he tried to find a pattern with all three of his occupations. Gently rocking his tentacles in an inch, out an inch in Yangyang’s mouth, sucking slowly at Yangyang’s chest, working his finger back and forth.

He managed all three smoothly with some concentration as two tentacles held the lube frozen above the blankets and Yangyang’s breath vacillated between short and rapid hiccups and long, drawn out, desperate inhales and exhales.

He arched his spine at the second finger, toes flexing again, and then whimpered and tested his teeth against the tentacles before remembering himself and tapping the bed with his far hand.

Sicheng lifted his lips from Yangyang’s skin and pulled the tentacles out, but left his fingers in.

“I just need a moment,” Yangyang gasped, heaving breath again and closing his eyes. Sicheng pressed soft kisses around the wet hickey, brushing his chin against Yangyang’s hard nipple. He flinched.

“Sorry,” Sicheng mumbled, and Yangyang shook his head.

“I’m good. I’m so good,” Yangyang said back, and his voice was going a bit sideways—like somewhere between having the tentacles removed and regaining his breath, he’d gotten a little less sober. He groaned softly and opened his eyes again, lips shiny with spit and irises eclipsed. “I can’t believe you,” he said, soft and almost slurred, then cleared his throat. He whimpered, clear and unmuffled, when Sicheng crooked his fingers. Yangyang mirrored that tension with his hand in Sicheng’s hair, tugging again, then smoothing his touch over the back of his head.

“What do you want?” Sicheng prodded, and Yangyang lifted his neck to give Sicheng eye-contact.

“Let me take one,” he said. “I’m relaxed enough.”

Sicheng scissored his fingers, testing that hypothesis, and Yangyang’s thighs flinched.

“It’ll be a little tight,” Sicheng said.

“Go slow,” he said. “Go slow. I want it.”

Withdrawing his fingers, Sicheng shifted on his knees and grabbed the lube from the grip of his tentacles, squirting some into one palm before slicking up his bottom left.

“These are so cool,” Yangyang said in the interim, reaching up to touch the ones hovering over his face. “Really.”

“Thank you,” said Sicheng, a bit preoccupied but also warmed by Yangyang’s candid sweetness. “I bled for them.”

“Wow,” Yangyang mumbled, playing with one of the pinkish tips. “That’s nuts. Did you pick the color? Is that why they’re yellow?”

Sicheng snorted, lining up with Yangyang’s sphincter. “No.” Of course Yangyang would make the connection between yellow and pornography. “It’s the earth energy,” he said and pushed up against Yangyang’s anus.

“O— _ah.”_

Yangyang’s thighs shivered, and Sicheng watched with interest as his breath picked up again, Yangyang clearly aroused by just the slightest pressure.

“I don’t think I realized you liked tentacles this much,” Sicheng said, adding to that pressure and waiting for Yangyang to give. He did in the next second, lips parting as Sicheng slipped past the band of muscle.

Yangyang swallowed, toes flexing again in Sicheng’s periphery. “I just think—” He paused to swallow once, twice, the muscles of one thigh twitching as Sicheng pushed slowly, slowly in. “—they’re neat,” he gasped. “Oh, you feel so good.”

Sicheng felt himself flush, reminded of the stirring in his gut, the want. He was looking at his boyfriend laid out and taking a tentacle like a genuine erotica, and those words popped out of Yangyang’s mouth. Yangyang squeezed the back of Sicheng’s neck and closed his eyes, tilting his head back and huffing out a breath through his mouth.

“When I—ah.” Yangyang’s hips jolted, words cut short, when Sicheng found a way to roll up against the memorized location of Yangyang’s prostate. “F- _fuck._ When I tug on your hair twice again—I’m gonna, I want them in my mouth again, so when I tug on your hair twice, will you start stretching me more with your fingers?”

Sicheng released a breath, amazed. “How many do you want to take?”

“Three?” he mumbled, blinking through another roll, thighs and abdomen tensing. His cock had hardened enough that his foreskin had tightened completely, and now that Sicheng had noticed, he wanted to duck his head down and suck the shine off his crown. “Four? I don’t want to go for broke but, _god.”_ Again, he whimpered and reached out for the two tentacles, squishing them together and opening his mouth for them like he couldn’t stand not being stuffed there anymore.

Sicheng’s head swam a little, and this time he slunk them down Yangyang’s tongue a little faster just to see what would happen. Yangyang moaned, squeezing Sicheng’s neck again desperately, and the vibrations slipped up the tentacles like little messengers of pleasure.

Sicheng slid the tentacle between Yangyang’s legs nearly completely out, then slid it back in. Yangyang’s inhale was a tiny sob, but he didn’t moan again, breath simply fluttering and his eyes falling closed.

SIcheng tried to lock into a rhythm, rocking into Yangyang with interchanging strokes. It was difficult, but as soon he got the pattern down, he watched as Yangyang’s cock twitched and gave up a bead of precum.

Yangyang immediately gagged when Sicheng ducked to lick at his head, body startling from toes to neck, and the prolonged, panicked keen Yangyang gave convinced Sicheng that Yangyang was communicating the likelihood of premature death.

He let up and instead pressed kisses to his flinching abdomen, waiting for Yangyang to tug at his hair.

It happened soon after, and Sicheng stilled the one tentacle so he could pry Yangyang open farther. Yangyang spread his knees as far as they would go as Sicheng dripped lube onto the towel and got him fluttering around the tentacle. It took a bit, but Yangyang frantically ran his hand to his dick to squeeze at the base when Sicheng pressed a second tentacle tip up against his anus.

“Thumb up for green,” Sicheng said, and when Yangyang didn’t do anything but remain in a state of paralysis, he repeated it again slowly. “Thumb up for green, down for red, middle for yellow.”

Yangyang’s hand retreated from his cock and shook gently as it pointed in the same direction of his dick curved against his knuckles: up.

Sicheng pressed in, and Yangyang’s hand flinched back to its ring of pressure at his base.

It was then that Sicheng paused and pressed a hand to Yangyang’s chest to get him to stay as he withdrew the tentacles from his mouth. “Do you want a cock ring, sweetheart?”

Sicheng rarely used gentle endearments unless he already thought Yangyang was slipping, and if the way Yangyang’s head had tried to follow the retreating tentacles was any indication, he definitely was. Yangyang made a small, desperate sound, licking over his lips and blinking through a creeping haze in his eyes.

Sicheng repeated the question, tapping his finger against Yangyang’s tense hand where it held his cock.

Yangyang cleared his throat after another three heartbeats, looking dizzy from the continuing pressure Sicheng hadn’t bothered to reduce between his legs. “A cock ring?” Yangyang mumbled, and his grip released on his dick. He heaved in a breath. “Please.”

Turning his head so he could see where he was putting his tentacles, he used the unoccupied ones on his right side to tip the toy cache toward himself. He found the dual cock and ball ring that way, and gently lubed it and Yangyang’s dick up.

“You’re really hard,” Sicheng warned, if only because it was not ideal to slip this on at anything harder than half-mast. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m good,” Yangyang promised, but his eyebrows still pinched as Sicheng eased it down his length, and the corners of Yangyang’s lips tightened. From the displeasure alone, Sicheng could feel him flag a little, which made the task easier but more regrettable. He hooked the outer silicone ring down over Yangyang’s balls, slinging them into the loop, then leaned back and studied the way Yangyang stared blankly at the ceiling.

“Kiss,” Sicheng said, leaning over, and Yangyang startled out of his furrowed moment to tilt his face and give Sicheng a very loose, very sloppy, but very sweet kiss. Messy, he sighed through his mouth, making a soft sound when Sicheng nipped his top lip. “Need anything?”

“Can I blow my nose?” Yangyang muttered, passing his hand partway down Sicheng’s back and scratching gently at his spine.

Sicheng gave him a tissue from the box, reaching with a tentacle to do it, and thumbed at the head of Yangyang’s cock until he was done. Yangyang raked back his fringe and slumped his head against the pillows, letting out a deep breath of trapped air. “Okay,” he said and dropped his jaw.

Sicheng reset the pattern—first getting Yangyang’s mouth settled, then giving his cock a little attention until he was back to where he had been, then unapologetically pushing with the second tentacle between Yangyang’s legs until it popped past Yangyang’s rectum and he keened, spine arching. A drop of precum beaded at his slit, and when Yangyang tugged at Sicheng’s hair with a wordless beg, Sicheng started to move.

Either motion rocked Yangyang physically, and Sicheng was mildly worried about him slipping up the pillows to hit the wall, but it was hypnotizing to see him drool, his muscles flinch, his chest rise and fall in cycling measures. Sicheng put just enough pressure against his prostate to pleasure him, and he could see it in every flex of his thighs. Yangyang swallowed around the tentacles in his mouth desperately and then tugged.

He tugged twice on Sicheng’s hair, water collecting at the corners of his eyes.

“No, baby,” Sicheng told him, and Yangyang sobbed—genuinely seemed to cry for the want of it, tears slipping down into the hair in front of his ears.

Every rock against Yangyang’s prostate had his throat slipping out a muted, tiny sound, his entire body shaking with pleasure and his cock looking painfully hard. He begged with his hand, pulling at Sicheng’s hair in a way that would have hurt someone with a weaker scalp. It only sent fizzling pleasure down his spine, though.

Sicheng caved with the next beseeching sob from Yangyang, dipping his fingers between Yangyang’s legs, now covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and tucked one fingertip up against the gyrating crease of the two tentacles sliding in and out.

Yangyang whimpered and again pulsed his grip twice in Sicheng’s hair.

Sicheng pressed, watching Yangyang’s face for pain and not stopping the steady thrust at either end, and then felt his fingertip slip past Yangyang’s rim.

The moan Yangyang let out was straight from his chest, loud and beautiful even muffled twice over. He was a mess with a bruise forming over his heart, turgid cock so red it was weeping, drool slipping down his jaw.

Sicheng only got up to his second knuckle before Yangyang came—almost violently, sweating and crying and letting out this high, wrecked sound from his throat, eyes clouded as he shot across his own chest in ribbons.

Yangyang collapsed to the bed with a whimper, gasping through his nose until Sicheng slid one tentacle out of his mouth. Sicheng left one in for fear of Yangyang feeling like he needed it. 

He grabbed a wad of tissues to wipe at Yangyang’s skin so he could rub his hand over his sweaty chest and soothe him. He unhooked his finger from Yangyang’s entrance and slowly, slowly slid the second tentacle out from there, too.

Hard between his own legs to the point that it was distracting but Sicheng not really interested in dealing with it in favor of watching Yangyang come down from his high, Sicheng lowered himself to press his lips to the hollow of Yangyang’s throat, then rest his head over his heart.

Its beat was hard but quieting.

“Hey,” Sicheng mumbled as Yangyang slowly blinked at the ceiling, lips tightening around the tentacle he had left in his mouth and giving it a slackened little suck. Sicheng felt him flex his anus and gently moved the tentacle away from his prostate. “Feeling okay?”

Yangyang’s throat worked, and Sicheng slipped the upper tentacle out past his lips and let it rest on his cheek, wet but there if he wanted it. He dropped another kiss against Yangyang’s skin. “Yangyang?”

The attempt Yangyang made at clearing his throat was weak, and his voice matched it, wrecked and sluggish, “I love you.”

Sicheng buried his face in Yangyang’s neck, laughing a little and nipping his skin.

“Really,” Yangyang promised. “I—really, Sicheng.”

“Okay,” Sicheng agreed, reaching up to brush Yangyang’s sweaty hair away from his temples. He knuckled away some of the drool on his face while he was at it.

“You’re amazing,” Yangyang mumbled, sounding properly drunk.

“Happy anniversary,” Sicheng diverted.

Yangyang absently petted Sicheng’s hair, then suddenly froze. “What?” he said. “No. This is also about y—I have a gift for you.” Adamant suddenly, Yangyang tried to roll onto his right side. 

Several things happened at once. The pained gasp he gave for his shoulder was one of them. Sicheng jerking his upper tentacle out of the way was another. The tentacle that remained up Yangyang’s ass knocked right up against Yangyang’s prostate, and what was a pained gasp turned into a wretched whimper. And then, “My body feels like jelly.”

Sicheng laughed, but he also pushed Yangyang back down onto the pillows and off his injured shoulder. He withdrew his tentacle from Yangyang’s rectum as delicately as possible. “I’ll get water.”

“Ah—oh my god you didn’t come,” Yangyang said, voice dipping into horror.

“I’m good,” Sicheng replied, pushing himself back off the mattress to get to his feet. He slowly began to reel his tentacles back into his skin, keying into how sore his sides felt now that he wasn’t hypnotized by his partner’s bliss.

He got up off his knees. His head swam. “No,” Yangyang said, hefting himself onto his elbow. “Water can wai—Sicheng?”

Sicheng’s vision was tilting, and his knees hit the mattress again. A hard exhale stuttered out through his lips, fatigue ripping up his sides. “Shit,” he heard himself slur just as the tips of the tentacles disappeared back into his skin.

Without a single word more, Sicheng blacked out.

* * *

He came to with his mouth tasting of ginseng, astragalus, angelica root—the whole replenishing tonic shebang—and the sounds of the sink in the bathroom getting turned off with a squeak. A single inhale brought him a very painful reminder of why he was lying in bed, rested neatly up against the pillow and tucked under the blankets like he’d been worried over by a mother hen.

Yangyang could be like that.

Yangyang could also be radiant, stepping into the doorway of the bedroom and lit up by the open blinds of East Asia. There was a pinch of concern all over his face, but it eased when he saw Sicheng was awake. He rested there against the jamb, temple tilted to the wood.

“That was a production,” Yangyang said, voice warm but definitely still wrecked. He looked like he’d only given himself a towel wash, hair still somewhere between sweaty and dry. Only wearing his loosest boxers, the hickey Sicheng had given him was fully bruised and on display. “I didn’t know it took so much out of you. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Sicheng said, tongue heavy with _shēng dì huáng._ “Tell me you didn’t panic-call Dejun.”

Yangyang grinned and shook his head. “I know what’s serious and what’s not.”

Nodding, Sicheng swallowed the tonic-infused saliva in his mouth. Pain aside and secrets safe, he really didn’t feel so bad. “Did you suck me off while I was unconscious?” Sicheng blurted, the question coming upon him—and not unreasonably. Yangyang technically had blanket permission, but.

“Who, me?” Yangyang asked, raising a hand to his chest in a mock-tease, but then he smiled with genuine warmness again and shook his head. “No. You had me freaked for a moment there. I’d like to suck your dick as thanks while you’re conscious. This anniversary isn’t _all_ about me.”

All Sicheng could manage for a laugh was a careful exhale through his nose. He wanted to lift his arms out from under the blankets, but dreaded the punishment for doing so.

“My ass is pretty loose,” Yangyang seemed to offer. “I could ride you if you’re okay with my legs being a shaky mess.” He tested the hinges of his jaw next with his fingers, then shrugged with glimmering eyes.

Sicheng pressed his cheek into the pillow under his head and inhaled the soft bergamot scent, hiding half his smile in its case. “I could use a massage,” he suggested instead, and if possible, Yangyang perked up further.

With ginger movements, he shuffled properly into the bedroom and very carefully lowered himself to the bed. It was there that he paused, simply looking at Sicheng for a prolonged moment with a small grin hooked into the edges of his mouth.

“Do you want your gift before I do a terrible job trying to relax you?” he asked, almost sitting back on his heels before remembering himself.

Sicheng huffed a small laugh. “What is it? If it’s not ridiculously time-intensive and complicated tentacles, I don’t want it.”

Yangyang’s laugh was truly one of the most pleasant gifts in the world, but Yangyang reached to the other side of the bed anyway, drawing something out from under Sicheng’s pillow there. He held it up in the daylight, a broad jade talisman on a thin leather band. With a butterfly trapped in a circle, it had the _Fu Lu Shou_ color patterning of purple, yellow, and green.

“Oh,” Sicheng said. “Oh,” he tried again, but found himself at a loss for words. Ignoring the pain, he drew his right hand out and reached to hold it, cool in his palm.

“I thought about getting you black jade, but you already have me to ward off evil energies,” Yangyang said, smiling still and therefore perfectly aware that Sicheng cared about this gift.

“Yes, I do,” Sicheng said, voice caving down the middle. “Thank you,” he croaked.

“You’re welcome,” Yangyang chirped and leaned down to give Sicheng a kiss on the forehead. His lips were tacky with lip balm, but that made sense given what Sicheng had done to his mouth. “Thank you for the tentacles,” Yangyang said next and kissed Sicheng on the lips.

_Anything for you,_ Sicheng thought to say, but he just nodded and leaned up for another kiss, jade clutched in his palm.

**Author's Note:**

> I deliberately tried building a fantasy off of Chinese cultural elements rather than the default European blocks, but if anyone who knows better than me feels I blundered over anything cultural, _please_ let me know!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)
> 
> **For now, until the collection is posted, I will link any other finished fics below:**
> 
> ["The Care and Feeding Of"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29625639) by nu-exo  
> —Even heroes need a little tender loving care every now and then.
> 
> ["Out of Place"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29620761) by freelancejouster  
> —Johnny's not high-ranking in Hell, he's just old—a son of a son of a son of the original fallen angels—so when he gets sent to Earth indefinitely (like, find someone to watch your plants, indefinitely) there's not much he can do but go.  
> He didn't expect injured hellhound Mark to tag along with him. And he didn't expect what happened next.
> 
> ["Layers, Waves"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29627724) by DimCandleLight  
> —Jaehyun is a good, ethical, honest, honorable—you get the gist—kindergarten teacher. His students’ backgrounds don't affect how he treats them, so he has never given it much thought.  
> Until he meets Doyoung at a housewarming party, where he discovers there is more to him than what meets the eye.  
> Or,  
> Kim Doyoung: The best researcher in the field, Hottest Dad™ on sight.


End file.
